Fully agree. Although, I think reform of the system is beneficial both to investors and employees. I've seen investors lose significant amounts of money due to structuring things the way they have been insisting upon.
An essay on why many engineers rationally value private-company equity at $0, focusing on information asymmetry, liquidity constraints, and incentive shifts in venture-backed startups.
The NATS project originally came out of CloudFoundry, and gnatsd later out of Apcera. I worked for Apcera while we were maintaining gnatsd. Docker and Kubernetes basically put that company out of business -- the founder went and started Synadia which was focused on NATS instead of container orchestration.
I think nats is a great technology for a number of use cases. It's unfortunate that it's so hard to find the resources to support and maintain open source software while paying developer salaries.
Derek put a ton of work, effort, and money into NATS.
It's a sad story to me; I don't know what the answer is to these sorts of "tragedy of the commons" type issues are.
Considering the way delta chat chat works; that doesn’t matter much. Approximately nobody has that client installed. And SMTP is not ideal for these things.
Also, there's another app being worked on called Stamp is a similar messaging system as well, but uses an HTTP based transport instead of SMTP.
The things that set Stamp apart is that is has:
* Spam mitigation in the base layer so relay operators don't need to deal with it
* An indirect address lookup system so you don't get tied to one Stamp provider.
* No attachment to PII to start accounts. (No phone number or email required)